


Trial

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 21:56:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9680705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: His name was Desmond Miles and he was supposed to save us.or:"There is a terrible something coming (disaster, poisonous gas, monster, pick anything), but there's no need to fear because the Heroes are going to go out and save the town and the world. Everyone sends them off and it's all fun and fanfare. Then they wait. But as the danger creeps ever closer some people manage to hang onto their hopes but others are becoming less certain. They stay because they've staked everything on their heroes and they will surely win. Right?"





	

The trial had been brief:

The defendant in ragged clothes with black-bruises at the corner of his mouth and arms tied behind his back shouting, “you stupid, _fucking_ imbeciles! It’s coming for us, it’s coming _right at us_. You think you know what it is but you don’t!”

and,

the prosecutor clean-cut and well-dressed, smiling indulgently at the last six adults left in the settlement. He waved his hand with the well-practiced air of a professional, dismissing the cries as, “pure heresy. The defendant is trying to incite a panic. He is, at best, a thief. At worst, conceivably capable of anything.”

\--

The witnesses were all children, sitting in crooked lines in the hollowed-out interior of what could have been a school or a church or a corner-store gas station for all they knew. Their dirty faces in rapt attention as they watched the defendant hang his head.

“You’re all going to die,” was what he said when it was clear there was no reprieve for him. He turned to the side just far enough to look at the children, to see their faces and show his own when he said, “remember me when it comes for you. Remember I told them what it was, remember I told them I could stop it. Remember I was supposed to stop it, I was the only one that could.”

but, the jury was bland-faced and outraged to be insulted.

“Now, children,” was the prosecutor just as grand as any pastor before his flock, “don’t worry about fairy stories. We’re all as safe as long as we follow the rules.”

\--

The execution was merciless, a long rope slung over a dying tree. The man was hoisted with the force of the jury pulling and the prosecutor looking remorseful about how it had come to this as he kicked the stool out from under the man’s kicking feet. There was a black sack covering his face but there was nothing muffling the gasping-grunts of his dying breath. The last spasmodic kicks of his limp, hanging legs were like echoes of a nightmare brought to full life.

“Strike his name from the record,” the judge ordered in the aftermath. And the woman who wrote all their names in the book smudged her thumb across the shape of the man’s name.

But, 

“His name was Desmond,” was whispered from one little mouth to one little ear. “He saw monsters,” was repeated like a prayer.

\--

It was ten years later, to the very day, when the wind turned sour as bad apples. It blew from the south all hot-and-dry. Three little girls were walking from their Aunt’s front porch to the safety of the meeting hall for a group prayer when the wind blew in. It came on them suddenly—so witnesses recalled—like it was alive, and it knocked them over heels over heads. The old Widow with a book full of names was there to see them climbing back to their feet, rubbing blood off their scraped knees and she thought she recalled them laughing to themselves about being clumsy. 

“Mother,” was the last whispered word of the little girl, with her fingers spread against the sweat-soaked bed sheets and her eyes glazed over milk-white and unseeing. Her little lips could barely manage the effort of it. 

And her sister, cold and stiff and still at her side, never saw or heard,

“I thought I saw a monster,” little Lucy Stillman told her Mother with the last quivering strength in her body.

\--

The old men and the grown ups pulled what was left of the living together like a knot. They condensed them to four buildings and they built a fence and called it a wall. They sealed the windows and shut the doors against the wind. It blew on-and-on for days, belching fire in erratic eddies wherever it went. At night, when the grown-ups were sleeping in cycles, the children were listening to the howling of the wind.

“Well, something has to be done!” was the desperate cry of the well-aged prosecutor. The whites of his eyes were graying over the pink of his eyelids and time had not been kind to him. The rally he’d promised when he’d hung the boy in old tree had never come to pass. “We can’t stand idly by! We’ve got strong boys here, grown men that can go and see it for themselves.”

And the men who had been boys, standing in a circle around the hanging tree were shaking in fear, thinking but not saying:

“I’ll go,” Altair said. He knocked his elbow into Malik (always to his left), “I’m as good as any. I’ll go and I’ll see what it is.”

\--

After dark, when the wind was screaming along the eaves of the house like long nails peeling shingles off, Altair was sharpening his knives with a whetstone, sitting with his knees spread wide around a little lamp. Malik was at his side, quietly making masks out of scraps, making plans about how to keep themselves alive when the wind came. All the little ears in the house were listening in desperation for any sound at all.

“Connor,” was Altair’s stage-whisper across the still-but-not-sleeping backs of the boys half his age. They were peeking out from under their blankets, watching as Connor crawled across the floor to sit across from Altair. “Remember the hanging tree.”

Malik was sighing with rags in his lap, looking at Altair like he wanted to strangle him. 

But Connor had been raised outside the village, taken in by the pity of grown men when they found him digging his Mother’s grave. Connor was bigger than any of them, ‘sturdy as a bear’ the grown-men liked to say. He nodded his head and he said, “I remember.”

\--

The farewell party was a placid affair, put on by weary women and old white men. They served tiny samples of real food and they made grand speeches like:

“The fate of our village is with you; go with the hopes of every man, woman and child at your back.”

And solemn warnings,

“Because if you fail, there will truly be nothing left.”

\--

The old men were nervous on the second day and denying it by day three. But Connor was packing supplies in little bags, pulling the children aside one-at-a-time and whispering in their ear the same as had been whispered over-and-over again ten years ago. His voice was low in the cup of his hand hiding the secret. 

“His name was Desmond.”

Like a prayer.

“He saw monsters.”

\--

A month later, the old men were starving and the children were crying at the windows for want of anything but boiled potato water to eat. Connor was big-as-a-bear, arms crossed and face grim as he looked out the window. The horizon had gone dark, the fires had scorched the earth and left the fence a smoldering outline of ash. 

“You have to choose,” Connor told them after dark when their bellies were empty and their fears were full. 

Just beyond the walls, he wind had turned into a whisper of words in languages they’d never imagined. It had started to seep through the cracks in the door, to break through the edges of the window panes. It was filling up the inside of the house like hysteria.

“Stay and wait or believe,” was the choice he gave them. 

\--

The end did not come swiftly. It slithered along the ground, a great swarm of legless things break through the ground. They rose like a wave, cresting higher than the tallest man among them. The sound of their endless screeching echoing and _echoing_ across the smoldering ground.

In the next town, farther north, the trial started with the cry of the judge, “now settle down! Now settle yourselves, we have before us a matter of heresy. This outsider has frightened our women and our children. He has brought chaos to our streets with hysterical stories. Now son, we’ve got _laws_ to protect our citizens from radical notions. We take our laws very seriously.” And he stared down from his podium, hawk-eyed and arrogant, with no idea what was coming for him.

and the Jury was sitting old folding chairs, knitting scarves for the coming winter, hardly paying attention to the wind picking up just outside.

Connor was gritting his teeth with his hands tied behind his back, thinking about the children’s hands slipping out from under his fingers and the way Altair had told him (when he first came to live there, when he was an outsider pretending to fit in), “we’re all going to die. The place I came from, they had laws too. They had laws that protected women and children and old blind men from _radical_ truths. They killed the only man that could have saved us. I saw his grave when the monsters came, they broke the earth in every direction but they didn’t touch his grave.” And it didn’t seem like enough, it couldn’t have been enough because all these people with their long-long-noses and their rolling-eyes would be dead soon. Connor would be dead soon, (maybe sooner) but it seemed like he should have said:

“His name was Desmond, and he was supposed to save us.”


End file.
